'...Federal employees planning to retire soon may be salivating at the thought of getting an 8.7% increase in their annuity payments next year. This sounds even more appealing as the 2023 COLA is the largest in about 40 years. Add in that 2023 federal pay raise is likely to be 4.6%, and an 8.7% increase in retirement income sounds very good. However, before you retire at the end of 2022 and...'
'...Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of FERS retirees will be wondering why they are only receiving a 2 percent COLA when the relevant measure of consumer prices increased by 2.8 percent. That's due to the bargain struck in Congress in the 1980s when FERS was created, which limits COLAs to 2 percent when consumer prices increase between 2 and 3 percent. But that was the wrong policy then, as it is now. It prevents FERS annuities from keeping up with inflation, which is the whole point of a COLA. It is past time for Congress to ensure FERS retirees receive a full COLA each year...'
'...For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of the Federal or Postal worker’s job, life’s silent opera begins. It is time to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, because – while no one acknowledges the “voices” and “sounds” of the medical condition, the “movements” are there, of the Agency beginning to realize less-than-acceptable performance; of using too much SL or extending one’s FMLA and remaining on LWOP...'
'...Those reforms would include: Higher employee contributions to the federal defined benefit pension plan; An elimination of supplemental payments to employees who retire before age 62; A switch to a defined contribution pension plan for new federal employees; reduce the G fund’s rate of return in the Thrift Savings Plan...'
'...in the active workforce CSRS people are seen as kind of a favored sub-category, with a civil service annuity formula producing a benefit roughly double what FERS people earn, for the same years of service and the same high-3 salary level. (The Social Security component of FERS and the employer contributions to the TSP there were designed to make up the difference. Whether they do is another question, one that you can get answered by asking any FERS person whether he or she would rather have CSRS.)...'
